Caregiving across generations: Do older adults with more grandchildren get another bite at the “sandwich” generation?

Abstract

Understanding the influence of grandchildren on long-term care use is a growing issue. Indeed, many countries, middle-aged adults provide unpaid care for aging family members, often their parents, at home. Although the influence of adult children's availability on their aging parents' caregiving decisions has been widely studied, the influence of grandchildren remains largely unstudied. Parental time allocated to childcare may compete with elder care, necessitating paid home care or transfer to a nursing home. Alternatively, grandparents may provide childcare, increasing incentives to keep grandparents at home. Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (75,296 observations from 11 countries covering years 2004–2018), we exploit an instrumental variable strategy to study the effect of grandchildren on grandparents' long-term care decisions, specifically, use of paid home care or transfer to a nursing home. We use the generosity of maternity leave policies in time and across countries as an instrumental variable to identify the effect of the number of grandchildren. We find that the presence of grandchildren significantly increases the likelihood of having grandparents live at home: the probability of paid home care significantly increases while the probability of nursing home admission falls significantly. In conclusion, policies influencing the number of grandchildren in families have an indirect impact on long-term care use trajectories, confirming that family policies and long-term care policies are strongly imbricated and should not be considered separately.